Mrs. Willis?”
I felt more nervous than I cared to admit. “I’ll be okay,” I said, hoping Art would think better of it, try talking me out of it. He didn’t.
“Let’s touch base after lunch,” he said. “I’ll give you a call around one unless I hear something from you before then. By the way, do you know where Mrs. Willis lives?”
“Um, no.”
“That’s okay. I just happen to have her address handy.” He read it off-she lived on a street of small bungalows near West High School, and I knew the neighborhood well.
Relieved not to be facing a day of flickering eyestrain, I downed a bowl of Cheerios (Honey Nut, which I’d chosen over Jeff’s objections), took a quick shower in the bath house, and donned a pair of khakis and a polo shirt for the trip to Knoxville. I was still the best-dressed person in the park-a truly startling distinction for me-but at least I’d scaled back from church clothes (and arrest clothes) to business casual.
One lane of I-75 South was closed for repaving, so traffic was crawling today. The drive back to Knoxville, which normally took thirty minutes, required nearly an hour this time. I got off at the Papermill Drive exit-also a bottleneck, as it had been for a couple of years now, during a massive interchange reworking-and wound through small residential streets to Sutherland Avenue, the main artery that led to West High and Mrs. Willis’s neighborhood. I had just parked across the street from her house when she emerged from the front door. She was wearing work clothes-blue jeans and a dingy T-shirt and boots-and carry ing pruning shears. She headed for a hedge of boxwoods lining the front of the yard and began hacking at the new growth with a vengeance.
My camera was in a bin in the passenger-side floorboard; on impulse, I fished it out and zoomed in on her face. She looked nearly as angry as the day she had stormed into my office, and the look brought the altercation back vividly into my memory.
“Mrs. Willis,” I called as I crossed the street, “could I talk to you for a minute?”
She turned slowly, and when she recognized me, her eyes flashed. “What do you want?”
“I’d like to talk to you about Dr. Carter,” I said.
“Dr. Carter’s dead,” she snapped, “and I’m glad. And you’re going to jail for killing her, and I’m glad of that, too.”
“I didn’t kill Dr. Carter,” I said. “I had no reason to.”
“I don’t give a damn,” she said. “I’m glad she’s dead, and I hope they give you the death penalty. The paper said they might try.”
The conversation was not going quite the way I had hoped it would. I tried to imagine what Detective John Evers would do if he were interrogating Mrs. Willis, but the only thing that came to mind was the feeling of his knee crowding the space between my legs, edging up toward my crotch and making me extremely uncomfortable. It was not a tactic I could use with a woman-especially a woman holding a pair of pruning shears.
“I think there might be a connection between your son’s death and Dr. Carter’s,” I said, hoping to appeal to her more maternal instincts. “Dr. Carter and the Chattanooga police were working to solve his murder when she was killed.” She didn’t say anything, but she lowered the shears to her side. I took that as an encouraging sign. “You got any idea who might have killed him?”
“I already talked to them detectives from Chattanooga,” she said. “Like I told them, I can’t imagine why anybody would have wanted to kill Craig.” I could think of some reasons, but it didn’t seem wise to mention them at this particular moment.
Something Miss Georgia Youngblood had said to me about pedophiles occurred to me-the phrase “Shit flow downstream,” which had gotten linked in my mind somehow with the phrase “Each one teach one”-and I wondered if Mrs. Willis could shed any light on her son’s pathology. “Mrs. Willis, can you think back to when Craig was about ten years old? Do you remember him at that age?”
“Of course I do,” she said. “I remember him at every age. Why?”
“I’m wondering if maybe something happened around that time. Something that might have been very frightening or upsetting to him.” Her eyes darted back and forth as she thought, and it seemed to me that she fixed on something, because they stopped darting and she looked away, her jaw clenched. “An incident, maybe, that might explain things that have happened more recently.”
She looked at me now. “What kind of incident? What are you talking about?”
I didn’t see any alternative but to put it out there. “Maybe an incident in which…in which an older male might have…done something to Craig. Something sexual.” She stared at me. “The reason I ask,” I floundered, “is that sometimes, when that happens to a boy, after he grows up, he…might be inclined…”
Even if I could have put the rest of the sentence into words, I didn’t get the chance. With a low snarl, she flung herself at me, pruning shears and all. Luckily, she didn’t wield them point-first; instead, she swung them like a club or a baseball bat, and I was able to put up a hand in time to block the blow and grab the shears. We wrestled over them for a moment, but I was considerably stronger than she was, and it wasn’t hard to take them from her. When I did, she came at me with her fists, as she had done to Jess. I dropped the shears and grabbed her, spinning her around so her back was to me, and wrapped her in a bear hug, pinning her arms to her sides.
“Let me
She had a point there. I could imagine the lead-in to the nightly newscast: “He’s already on trial for
She glowered at me, her chest heaving, tears beginning to run down her face. “Of course I care,” she said, “but nobody else gives a good goddamn. You think I don’t know how the police feel about…people like Craig?”
It was an admission of sorts. “No matter what they think,” I said, “they’ll still try to solve his murder.”
“Bullshit,” she said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if the cop that arrested him was the one that killed him.”
I was startled that she’d thought that through, although I suppose I shouldn’t have been. She’d undoubtedly spent far more time turning over the possibilities in her mind than Art and I had. “Who else could have?”
She gave me a look of undisguised contempt. “Gee, Mr. Fancy Ph.D., let’s think about that.” She shook her head. “It’s done. Nobody will ever be caught. Get the hell out of here and don’t come back. If I see you again, I’m calling 911. In fact, if you’re not gone in thirty seconds, I’m calling 911. Maybe even if you are.”
I bent down and picked up the pruning shears. Suddenly she looked frightened. With an underhanded toss, I lobbed them over the hedge and up near her front porch, just in case she was still inclined to take another run at me. Then I held up one hand and backed away, across the street, and got into the Taurus. I locked the doors first, then started the engine. As I eased away from the curb, I glanced back just in time to see Mrs. Willis hurling the pruning shears in my direction. They hit the trunk lid with a scraping clatter that I knew had left a nasty gouge.
Once I was safely out of the neighborhood, I paged Art. He rang me right back. “Hey, how’d it go with Mrs. Willis?”
“Not so good,” I said.
“You mean she didn’t confess?”
“That’s one way of putting it.”
“What’s another way?”
“Let’s just say that if all you’ve got is a pair of pruning shears, everything looks like a hedge.”
“Oh,
“That good.”
“You lose any body parts?”
“No. Only the last of my dignity. You get a chance to talk to the guy that caught Craig Willis in the act?”
“Not yet. He’s kinda hard to reach.”
“Because?”
“Because he’s been in Iraq for the past four months. He’s in the Guard, and his unit got called up right after
